Monday, September 11, 2006

On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check

He polished the prose of Muslim leaders so their views would be marketable. He invited them home to break bread. He even attacked his co-religionists in print for not being more realistic.

But not anymore, he says.

We keep hearing about how these terrorists are only a tiny fraction of Muslims, and the overwhelming majority of them in the United States are patriotic and loathe what is being done in their name. Perhaps most indeed do. But when it comes to speaking out against the savagery being done in their name, their silence is deafening.

Nor do any of them seem to be cooperatively "dropping a dime" about anything questionable going on or being discussed in the mosque.

But it's worse than that, says Ira Rifkin. Essentially, they don't believe Jews (and to a lesser extent, anyone not Muslim) have the right to exist. We are to surrender to dhimmitude, and *we* must always accommodate *them*, even though *they* moved *here*.

There are still fools on the left, who attribute Muslim extremism to neo-colonialism or the usual blame Western Civilization in general and America in particular crap. To the dupes, our terrorist enemies are a rag-tag group of the dispossessed of the world, legitimately mad at the United States for our wealth and interference in the world.

How to answer them? Two words: Palestinian statehood.

Remember when we were told that the "intafada" was about the desire of the Palestinians to have a nation of their own? If they were just given that, we were told, there would be peace.

Well, they got that. And now they are claiming that having two states side by side constitutes "apartheid":

That (willingness to make a deal) is not the case among the majority of Muslims, whose leading mainstream organizations, in the United States as well, insist that all Palestinians living outside the Jewish state's 1948 borders have a right to return to resettle in Israel. That's a recipe for Israel's demographic eradication and they know it.

There's a world for this claim about Israeli "apartheid": It's called, simply, bullshit.

Few of any of these Arabs are even descended from those who fled in the 1948 war, and as for those who in fact did, there is one simple answer for them: that's what you get for trying to "push the Jews into the sea and pick up where Hitler left off".

But just when you are pleased that Mr. Rifkin has wised up, he includes a little but-I'm-still-a-good-liberal disclaimer:

Jews are equated with Israel, Israel is equated with the United States; the absurdly mismanaged war in Iraq and the global conflict against "terrorism" are conflated in Muslim minds.

Now look here Mr. Rifkin, these Islamofascist savages DID and sometimes still do have alliances of convenience with other tyrants. The murderous Saddam and Sons may have been secular booze and porno hounds, but they still provided safe harbor, logistical and even financial support to the Islamunist savages. And the world is better for their demise.

We have built a working federal system of government over there, and while civil war may erupt, in which case Iraq still might need to be partitioned into two or three smaller nations, so far it is holding.

For this, several years into it, we have paid with less than 2,500 dead. Any casualty is sad, but those figures are incredibly low. Do you realize that this far into the Vietnam War, we had lost about FIFTEEN times that many casualties? And the cause of giving the people there something better than a choice between Tweedle-secular tyrant and Tweedle-mullah is undeniably noble and just.

Moreover, we must understand the ultimate goal of the jihadists: they want to be us. Not that they desire to adopt western norms, customs, and extravagances. Quite the opposite. They want our position of power that allows those things to dominate the world. They wish to establish themselves as a regional power first and then as a world power. And they intend to do so, not by defeating us militarily, but by breaking our will. They believe that we can be made to retreat, with a sense of regret, to the relative safety behind our two oceans.

Here at home our arguments play into this plan. We are told we should return home because Iraq has descended into civil war. But this would only teach our terror driven enemy that killing their own will hasten our retreat even faster than killing us. Perhaps the warring factions should be sorted into different mini-nations, but to cut and run is to invite a vacuum there.